Pajamas Media » Should Cops or Generals Spearhead the War on Terror?

A closer reading of the RAND study shows it doesn’t wholly disparage military force. The monograph, How Terrorist Groups End, points out that terror groups often become susceptible to political reconciliation or police action only after the neutralization of their geopolitical and state sponsors, a process in which military force plays a preeminent role.

Based on a study of “648 groups that existed between 1968 and 2006″, RAND finds “the evidence … indicates that most [terrorist] groups have ended because (1) they joined the political process or (2) local police and intelligence arrested key members.” Yet this is often made possible only by the decline in the fortunes of their international sponsors. The RAND report gives a number of examples.

Page 15 says “a number of terrorist groups that advocated the creation of an independent Armenian state, such as the Armenian Resistance Group, disbanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Page 21 says “the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that a number of groups, such as the FMLN in El Salvador, saw their outside assistance quickly begin to dry up.” Page 69 cites the “end of the Cold War” and the “Soviet Union’s withdrawal of support for Marxist movements in Latin America” as a key factor in the the Salvadoran insurgency’s decision to negotiate a peace settlement.

Gosh. You mean the way to win the “war on (islamofascist) terror gangs” is to destroy their state sponsorships?

And military force is one way of accomplishing precisely that?

Oh, my god. Who could possibly have imagined such a thing?

Except Daily Pundit, which has been shouting exactly that strategy at the top of its lungs for approximately six years, and pointing repeatedly to the works of the chief proponent of that strategy, Angelo Codevilla?

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